Stingy

First, I had fun presenting today, and if you were in attendance, I hope you enjoyed it. If you want to see high quality video (and by high quality I mean the Fellowship Hall screen is at quite a slant, and I'm not in the picture half the time), I strongly recommend you check it out by clicking the link at the top of this page. Second, the people have spoken--I will have a handout next week and in the future.

Today's verse is Proverbs 28:22:

A stingy man is eager to get rich

   and is unaware that poverty awaits him.

By the way, I use Bible Gateway as my online reference, and it's a wonderful site. It allows you to choose which translation to use, lets you look at alternate versions side-by-side and will play audio for those hard-to-pronounce words (like this morning's Old Testament reading). Use what you're comfortable with, but I think you'll like this site, and I've been using it for about 10 years now.

I'll throw out some synonyms of stingy, and we'll see if a pattern develops (all from synonym.com. Seriously.):

Beggarly, mean, cheap, chintzy, penny-pinching, tightfisted, grudging, miserly, tight, parsimonious, penurious

And it also suggested I look up:

Selfish, uncharitable, ungenerous, meanspirited

Doesn't sound too pleasant. We're not talking about careful spending, shopping for deals or caution with money, but instead a cheapness that borders on malicious. When we think of stingy, we imagine Scrooge, Mr. Potter in "It's  A Wonderful Life" or other people that take joy in withholding money from others. Solomon isn't mincing words here--don't get rich on the backs of others.

We need to remember that in the church today in how we compensate our called leaders. Our school principal, Bill Meyer, recently introduced me to a term with which I was unfamiliar. To begin, most Lutheran schools have three sources of funding:

1. Tuition (parent source, state pre-school money and STO money)

2. Church

3. Other income (fund raisers, grants, etc.)

4. Fourth source income

What is "fourth source income," you ask? That's when we don't pay our pastors and teachers what they're worth and instead justify it by saying, "Well, they knew what they were getting into." That, my friends, is stingy, and Solomon is pretty explicit in stating that being stingy is not God-pleasing. I'm happy to say we do quite well by our pastors and teachers at Trinity, and would be happy to explain to any who ask my justification for making that statement.

And this should always be our goal. We believe that God, through the Holy Spirit, sent these men and women to work with us and guide us and our children in the faith, but God NEVER freed us from the responsibility of caring for them financially. I suggest you set aside a week of vacation at the end of November to read the many and often posts I will have on spiritual gifts when we get to 1 Corinthians 12, because it will take you that long to wade through what I will write. The gift the Spirit has given many of us is to provide for the church, and chances are pretty good the people who need to hear this message won't come anywhere near this blog. But this is just one way I communicate.

Bottom line:

1. Don't be stingy (that's right--tip your waitress AND the pizza deliverer AND the deliverer of your Wall Street Journal)

2. Don't be stingy as a church (or a church member)

3. Anytime we tell God "We just don't have enough," believe me, he will VERY QUICKLY show us what "not enough" REALLY means. My suggestion--don't find out.

Scott